plants and the problems of handling radioactive waste materials, consideration has been given in the United States to locating more and more generating capacity on a given site. These envisioned power parks would consist of 20,000 to 50,000 MWe of generating capacity on a land area of 20-100 km^. A number of studies have been conducted to assess the possible impacts of the dissipation of waste heat from large electric power centers.24-27 The impacts most often studied include heat-island formation, initiation of convective clouds, increased humidity and precipitation, fog formation, and vorticity concentration. The potential for climate and weather modification in the vicinity of power parks can be visualized by examining the energy density of the waste heat being rejected from them. Table 2.5 compares the energy production of natural atmospheric events to that from three groups of existing power plants and three hypothetical energy-park configurations. The table shows that the heat released from an energy park will greatly exceed the solar flux at the ground and may even approach the latent heat release of a thunderstorm that covers approximately the same geographical area. It should be noted that if evaporative cooling towers were used in the energy park, only about 20% of the waste heat would be rejected as sensible heat and the rest as latent heat. Nevertheless, the heat release from an energy park is of the same magnitude as the energy of many natural phenomena. At the least, power parks will produce sizable heat islands or thermal mountains that can increase cloudiness and precipitation by triggering or enhancing convective activity. The increase in convective precipitation produced by such a power park depends on the local climate. Increases would probably be most significant in the southern and southwestern United States.24,27 The production and enhancement of ground fog is also considered an important impact of power parks and is expected to be most common for parks located in the Northwest and in the Appalachian Mountain regions.27 potentially serious consequence of energy parks could be the release of large amounts of waste heat, which could concentrate atmospheric vorticity and increase the possibility of severe weather. Vorticity concentrations from power-park energy releases would be most probable in areas where, and during seasons when, convective vortices are most likely to occur naturally.
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